Amph What book are you reading right now?

I'm reading through all of the Tom Clancy Jack Ryan novels...with a few Star Wars and Star Trek breaks mixed in...

 

Xenocide by Orson Scott Card

 

I love all the Enderverse books.

Golden Son by Pierce Brown

 

Yes the series has been very interesting so far. I've never read any books that really deal with the morality of decisions before.

 

Nonfiction - The Road to Little Dribbling by Bill Bryson.
Fiction - Career of Evil by Robert Galbraith (aka J.K. Rowling). It's the third in the Cormoran Strike series.

 

Taking a break from Legends, to delve into canon with Bloodline.

 

The Colour Of Magic book has 4 stories in it, the first of which is also that title. That was fun. I look forward to more. And if they all are at least that good then perhaps Discworl will fill that void that sometimes crop up between books. There's 41 of them so it's gonna take some time.

 

I have all the Discworld books. I've only read the first 20 so far but most of them are good. The jokes and gags in them are great.

 

How is Career of Evil? I read the first two and found the second to be quite boring in comparison to the first.


Grievousdude - One of the things I love about Card's series is that he definitely smudges out the gray area and shows how easy it is for humans to rationalize our decisions and how important it is for us to think them through.

 

I'm about halfway through Career of Evil and it's pretty good. I'm enjoying it.

 

Outside In: Ten Christian Voices We Can't Ignore

 

I'm, actually, reading a few. More like 're- reading, anyway.

Pride, & Prejudice, & Zombies, The Original SW series, and Percy Jackson and the Olympians: The Lightning Thief.

 

This Summer I've committed myself to read all the books I've always wanted to but never got around to. So, first up is Upton Sinclair's The Jungle. This one has personal interest for me as my great grandparents and my grandparents both worked in the Chicago Stockyards, and my father grew up behind the stockyards up until the age of 5.

 

Interested to hear your opinion. Opinions of it vary wildly.

 

that's more or less the same reason i read the life of pi

 

Mason & Dixon by Thomas Pynchon.

 

I just re-read The Hunt For Red October my self. Still a crackling good Cold War yarn.

Currently reading; Luke Skywalker and the Shadows of Mindor by Matthew Stover. No longer canon, but so far the new canon stinks, so to get my SW fix I'm going backwards.

 

Listening to the audiobook of Red Queen by Victoria Aveyard. Not only is the story really good but the reader, Amanda Dolan, is fantastic

 

Royal Babylon, this book by a guy named Karl Shaw that's a no-holds-barred weird facts account about Europe's royal families.

From reading this, all I can say is they're messed up, and that's saying the least.

 

I'm reading Ruthless by Ron Miscavage.
He's the father of David Miscavage, the leader of Scientology.

The guy joined Scientology back in the 1960's, and he gives a good account of why it was so attractive to him. It was at the time an exercise confidence building essentially. Get rid of you hangups and see the world more clearly.

He is fairly honest about himself. He fought and beat his wife in a pretty dysfunctional marriage. He was an aggressive salesman who got into early pyramid schemes. A tough guy.

At this stage of my reading, a dallying in a self confidence course has escalated into moving his whole family overseas to England to have them all trained up, with David being particularly enthusiastic. No horrors yet. He's making the point that Scientology was Good, in the good old days.

It's a pretty easy read. Ron, and his ghost writer, keep the language simple, and it's only 250 pages.

 

Yeah, I think of them really were. Kaiser Wilhelm II supposedly had a very infantile sense of humor.

 

One Good Turn (2006) – Kate Atkinson

One Good Turn starts with what appears to be a chance collision and a violent act of road rage. But somehow the people involved and the people who bear witness to this event will find themselves caught in an ever tightening whirlpool of fate that draws them together and simultaneously deeper and deeper into a game of violence, death and corruption. Jackson Brodie is back from Case Histories; this is Atkinson’s second book about the retired detective. But the ensemble is large and Atkinson has invested all of them with life. There’s the weary crime novelist who wishes he could write some thing better than the genre fare he’s been turning out; there’s the police detective struggling to put the pieces together and also be a decent single mother to her delinquent teenage son; there’s the bitter comedian attempting a come-back after a decade of flops and failures; there’s the wife of a cheating, comatose, corrupt real-estate magnate; there’s the Russian prostitute in over her head with a mysterious organization called Favours. And then there’s that hulking man with the baseball bat. Let’s not forget him. This book is really astoundingly great. It moves like a thriller and the plot twists are often genuinely jaw dropping. But the characterizations and writing style is at the level of literary masterpiece. Atkinson is, with her Jackson Brodie series, trying to prove that it’s possible to craft a work that functions to perfection as both a genre piece and a piece of high literature and to the degree that Case Histories already proved it, One Good Turn just takes both elements up a notch in my opinion. This is both a better mystery thriller and a more compelling piece of character based literature. This is a great book, no question and I really can’t recommend it highly enough. It’ll keep you alternately guessing at the mystery, laughing out loud at the humor and feeling the real pain of the characters. In a bibliography filled with genius, Atkinson has crafted a novel that stands out, even among giants. 4 stars.

tl;dr – shocking plot twists and an impenetrable mystery meet deeply evocative character-based drama in this novel, a meditation on the interconnectedness of our violence, pain-filled lives. 4 stars.

More Book Reviews!

 

War and Peace... again. But this time I've gone with the Pevear & Volokhonsky translation instead of my old paperback copy of the Dunnigan translation, and that honestly seems to have done the trick as I'm really enjoying it this time (I have seen people advocate the Dunnigan over P&V for casual reading and speaking now from experience... no. Don't do it.). Plus since I'm one of those iPad sporting snots these days it's much less of a hassle to hang on to.

Currently the plan after W&P is to take a nonfiction break with David Hajdu's The Ten-Cent Plague and then dive into Les Misérables The Wretched because Penguin insisted on labeling Christine Donougher's translation something literally no one, ever, will use to refer to the book. It's a summer of long-ass foreign literature I've put off reading for years, I tell ya what.

 

Started Steve Burrows' A Siege of Bitterns earlier and it's pretty good so far. It's a police procedural set in Norfolk, UK, and the main character is a police DCI who is a birder as well. I'm into bird watching so I figured I'd check it out. The author has two more in the series coming out and they are already on my Amazon UK list.

 

Ill Met In Lankhmar which has the stories Swords and Deviltry and Swords Against Death. This is my first reading of any Lankhmar. I saw adverts for it as an RPG in Dragon Magazine way back in the 80's, their D&D stats in Gods Demi-Gods and Heroes. And of course in Dragon issue 100 Gygax wrote a story about his versions of the characters At Midnight Black Cat Comes which features Gord of Grayhawk and Chert.